While our presidents praise America’s magnificent national park system, they’re not maintaining them. Bill Clinton, for example, spoke of how lucky he was to have Hot Springs National Park as a childhood playground. Yet he sat idle as that park’s natural wonders and facilities deteriorated – and as the Park Service’s maintenance backlog soared to $5 billion.
Likewise, in his 2000 campaign, a khaki-clad George W posed in the majestic Cascade Mountain Range. Wailing that parks were “at the breaking point,” he vowed to eliminate Clinton’s backlog. Instead, he slashed the NPS budget (including a 40 percent cut for repairs of the very park he’d used as a political prop). The maintenance backlog ballooned to nearly $9 billion under his presidency. Ranger George did make one fix, however – a PR fix. Bush operatives instructed park superintendents to make budget cuts, but not to call them cuts. Instead, they were to say that our parks were undergoing “service level adjustments.”
Under Obama, who speaks movingly of a childhood Greyhound bus trip with his family to see some of our parks, another 12 percent has been chopped from the NPS budget – bumping the deferred maintenance bill to a staggering $11.5 billion! To his credit, Obama has proposed a 2016 “Centennial Budget” for NPS, mitigating years of destructive underfunding and calling for $1 billion to address the backlog. Good for him. But that still leaves a $10 billion shortfall, and the sour duo of Sen. Mitch McConnell and Speaker John Boehner will oppose even that little increase for the maintenance of these invaluable public assets.
Our so-called “leaders are literally stripping “service” out of the National Park service and assuring that our national treasures will fall into acute disrepair. It’s a bipartisan disgrace.

Superrich donors turn our democracy into their plutocracy

The problem with the GOP presidential debates is that the wrong people are on stage.
Sure, Bush, Cruz, Walker, and gang are the candidates, but the driving forces in this election have names like Mercer, Braman, Hendricks, Fernandez, and Cameron. They are part of a small but powerful coterie of multimillionaire corporate executives and billionaires who fund secretive presidential SuperPACs that can determine who gets nominated. These elephantine funders play politics like some superrich, heavy-betting gamblers play roulette – putting enormous piles of chips on a name in hopes of getting lucky, then cashing in for governmental favors.
Thus, Robert Mercer, chief of the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, has already put more than $11 million into Ted Cruz’s SuperPAC; Norman Braman, former owner of the Philadelphia Eagle’s football team, has $5 million down on Marco Rubio; Diane Hendricks, the billionaire owner of a roofing outfit and a staunch anti-worker activist, is betting $5 million on Scott Walker; Mike Fernandez, a billionaire investor in healthcare corporations, has backed Jeb Bush with $3 million; and Ronald Cameron, an Arkansas poultry baron, is into Mike Huckabee for $3 million.
These shadowy SuperPACs amount to exclusive political casinos, with only a handful of million-dollar-plus players dominating each one (including the one behind Hillary Clinton’s campaign). These few people are not merely “big donors”– they are owners, with full access to their candidate and an owner’s prerogative to shape the candidate’s policies and message.
These treacherous few are using their bags of cash to pervert American democracy into rank plutocracy. Why not put them on stage and make each one answer pointed questions about what special favors they’re trying to buy.

A Wealthy Few lead in Giving To Campaigns,” www.nytimes,com, August 2, 2015.

Phil Gramm campaigns against bigotry and exploitation of workers

Phil Gramm, the former right-wing senator from Texas, has surprised me.
I had assumed he had zero charitable instincts, for he kept trying to kill such poor people’s programs as food assistance: “We’re the only nation in the world where all our poor people are fat,” he smirked.
But Phil seems to have developed a new empathy for people who’re demonized. Although he’s now a Wall Street operative, Gramm returned to Capitol Hill in July to express solidarity with victims of bigotry in our country. Wow! Gramm standing with Black Lives Matter and oppressed immigrants!
No, no... not “them.” The former senator was testifying against a new rule requiring corporations to reveal the spread between their CEO’s pay and what their workers get. It’s “demagoguery,” Phil grumped. Then he lurched into the abyss of absurdity by wailing that overpaid corporate chieftains are actually – get this – victims of public bigotry. The multimillionaire snarled that “The one form of bigotry that is still allowed in this country is bigotry against the successful.”
To prove this bizarre claim, Gramm cited the specific case of his buddy, Ed Whiteacre, who retired as CEO of AT&T in 2007. Ed was widely condemned for grabbing a $158-million retirement package for himself as he went out the door. Gramm practically wept as he related the sad story of Whiteacre’s heartache. The guy was actually underpaid, wailed Gramm – “If there’s ever been an exploited worker, he was exploited. It was an outrage!” Odd since the former senator, had never previously expressed the slightest concern about exploited workers.
Perhaps Gramm could do a telethon to support ex-executives like Ed, who suffer such soul-crushing bigotry. Please give ‘til it hurts... and don’t laugh, for Phil really feels the pain of the rich.

“Former Texas Senator: CEOs are the real victims,” www.becausefinanceisboring.com.
“GOP: Deregulate Wall Street, or The Roman Empire Will Fall,” www.huffingtonpost.com, July 28, 2015.
The Committee on Financial Services, www.financialservices.house.gov.